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January 9, 2011

Pausing to laugh at ourselves

Here's a more-than-hilarious video of animal voice-overs from the BBC.

The anthropomorphisms in the video probably will make some of my colleagues shudder--one of the first lessons we teach in Animal Behavior classes is to be careful ascribing human traits and behaviors to animals.

However, Aldo Leopold, as he wrote "A Sand County Almanac" used anthropomorphism as a technique to show that humans and animals were all part of the same community. Not a bad thing to remember. And, it's just darn funny.

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Responsibility defined

"Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that [we], while captain of the adventuring ship, [are] hardly the sole object of its quest, and that [our] prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark."

--A. Leopold, “On a Monument to the Pigeon” in A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (pp. 109-110).

About Me

I am a Professor of Conservation Biology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I find myself in the role of teacher, research biologist, photographer, hunter, canoeist, poet, and bee keeper. My wife and son are both better photographers. I've written over 90 scientific publications, but I most enjoyed publishing two books of poetry: "Dust and Mud" and "Cursed with Wings."